Márton Kanász-Nagy

A cold-atom Fermi–Hubbard antiferromagnet

Exotic phenomena in systems with strongly correlated electrons emerge from the interplay between spin and motional degrees of freedom. For example, doping an antiferromagnet is expected to give rise to pseudogap states and high-temperature superconductors. Quantum simulation using ultracold fermions in optical lattices could help to answer open questions about the doped Hubbard Hamiltonian, and has recently been advanced by quantum gas microscopy. Here we report the realization of an antiferromagnet in a repulsively interacting Fermi gas on a two-dimensional square lattice of about 80 sites at a temperature of 0.25 times the tunnelling energy. The antiferromagnetic long-range order manifests through the divergence of the correlation length, which reaches the size of the system, the development of a peak in the spin structure factor and a staggered magnetization that is close to the ground-state value. We hole-dope the system away from half-filling, towards a regime in which complex many-body states are expected, and find that strong magnetic correlations persist at the antiferromagnetic ordering vector up to dopings of about 15 per cent. In this regime, numerical simulations are challenging and so experiments provide a valuable benchmark. Our results demonstrate that microscopy of cold atoms in optical lattices can help us to understand the low-temperature Fermi–Hubbard model.Many exotic phenomena in strongly correlated electron systems emerge from the interplay between spin and motional degrees of freedom [1, 2]. For example, doping an antiferromagnet gives rise to interesting phases including pseudogap states and high-temperature superconductors [3]. A promising route towards achieving a complete understanding of these materials begins with analytic and computational analysis of simplified models. Quantum simulation has recently emerged as a complementary approach towards understanding these models [4–8]. Ultracold fermions in optical lattices offer the potential to answer open questions on the lowtemperature regime of the doped Hubbard model [9–11], which is thought to capture essential aspects of the cuprate superconductor phase diagram but is numerically intractable in that parameter regime. Already, Mott-insulating phases and short-range antiferromagnetic correlations have been observed, but temperatures were too high to create an antiferromagnet [12–15]. A new perspective is afforded by quantum gas microscopy [16–28], which allows readout of magnetic correlations at the site-resolved level [25–28]. Here we report the realization of an antiferromagnet in a repulsively interacting Fermi gas on a 2D square lattice of approximately 80 sites. Using site-resolved imaging, we detect (finite-size) antiferromagnetic long-range order (LRO) through the development of a peak in the spin structure factor and the divergence of the correlation length that reaches the size of the system. At our lowest temperature of T/t = 0.25(2) we find strong order across the entire sample, where the staggered magnetization approaches the ground-state value. Our experimental platform enables doping away from half filling, where pseudogap states and stripe ordering are expected, but theoretical methods become numerically intractable. In this regime we find that the antiferromagnetic LRO persists to hole dopings of about 15%, providing a guideline for computational methods. Our results demonstrate that quantum gas microscopy of ultracold fermions in optical lattices can now address open questions on the low-temperature Hubbard model. The Hubbard Hamiltonian is a fundamental model for spinful lattice electrons describing a competition between kinetic energy t and interaction energy U [29]. In the limiting case of half-filling (average one particle per site) and dominant interactions (U/t 1) the Hubbard model maps to the Heisenberg model [1]. There, the exchange energy J = 4t/U can give rise to antiferromagnetically ordered states at low temperatures [30]. This order persists for all finite U/t, where charge fluctuations reduce the ordering strength [31]. Away from half-filling, the coupling between motional and spin degrees of freedom is expected to give rise to a rich many-body phase diagram (see Fig. 1a), which is challenging to understand theoretically due to the fermion sign problem [32]. Even so, in the thermodynamic limit commensurate long-range order (LRO) has been conjectured to transition to incommensurate LRO infinitesimally far from half-filling, whereas for finite-size systems commensurate order is expected to extend to non-zero doping [31, 33]. The strength of global antiferromagnetic order in spin systems on bipartite lattices is quantified by the staggered magnetization m = |m|. The component along the z spin direction is

Exploring the anisotropic Kondo model in and out of equilibrium with alkaline-earth atoms

We propose a scheme to realize the Kondo model with tunable anisotropy using alkaline-earth atoms in an optical lattice. The new feature of our setup is Floquet engineering of interactions using time-dependent Zeeman shifts, that can be realized either using state-dependent optical Stark shifts or magnetic fields. The properties of the resulting Kondo model strongly depend on the anisotropy of the ferromagnetic interactions. In particular, easy-plane couplings give rise to Kondo singlet formation even though microscopic interactions are all ferromagnetic. We discuss both equilibrium and dynamical properties of the system that can be measured with ultracold atoms, including the impurity spin susceptibility, the impurity spin relaxation rate, as well as the equilibrium and dynamical spin correlations between the impurity and the ferromagnetic bath atoms. We analyze the nonequilibrium time evolution of the system using a variational non-Gaussian approach, which allows us to explore coherent dynamics over both short and long timescales, as set by the bandwidth and the Kondo singlet formation, respectively. In the quench-type experiments, when the Kondo interaction is suddenly switched on, we find that real-time dynamics shows crossovers reminiscent of poor mans renormalization group flow used to describe equilibrium systems. For bare easy-plane ferromagnetic couplings, this allows us to follow the formation of the Kondo screening cloud as the dynamics crosses over from ferromagnetic to antiferromagnetic behavior. On the other side of the phase diagram, our scheme makes it possible to measure quantum corrections to the well-known Korringa law describing the temperature dependence of the impurity spin relaxation rate. Theoretical results discussed in our paper can be measured using currently available experimental techniques.

Resonant inelastic x-ray scattering as a probe of band structure effects in cuprates

We analyze within quasiparticle theory a recent resonant inelastic x-ray scattering (RIXS) experiment on

Quantum correlations at infinite temperature: The dynamical Nagaoka effect

{\text{YBa}}_{2}{\text{Cu}}_{3}{\text{O}}_{6+x}

Stabilizing the false vacuum: Mott skyrmions

with the incoming photon energy detuned at several values from the resonance maximum [Minola et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 114, 217003 (2015)]. Surprisingly, the data show a much weaker dependence on detuning than expected from recent measurements on a different cuprate superconductor,

Confinement-induced interlayer molecules: A route to strong interatomic interactions

{\text{Bi}}_{2}{\text{Sr}}_{2}{\text{CuO}}_{6+x}

Global superfluid phase diagram of a three-component fermion mixture with magnetic ordering

[Guarise et al., Nat. Commun. 5, 5760 (2014)]. We demonstrate here that this discrepancy, originally attributed to collective magnetic excitations, can be understood in terms of the differences between the band structures of these materials. We find good agreement between theory and experiment over a large range of dopings, both in the underdoped and overdoped regimes. Moreover, we demonstrate that the RIXS signal depends sensitively on excitations at energies well above the Fermi surface that are inaccessible to traditionally used band structure probes, such as angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy. This makes RIXS a powerful probe of band structure, not suffering from surface preparation problems and small sample sizes, making it potentially applicable to a number of cuprate materials.

Anomalous Conductances in an Ultracold Quantum Wire.

Do quantum correlations play a role in high temperature dynamics of many-body systems? A common expectation is that thermal fluctuations lead to fast decoherence and make dynamics classical. In this paper, we provide a striking example of a single particle created in a featureless, infinite temperature spin bath which not only exhibits non-classical dynamics but also induces strong long-lived correlations between the surrounding spins. We study the non-equilibrium dynamics of a hole created in a fermionic or bosonic Mott insulator in the atomic limit, which corresponds to a degenerate spin system. In the absence of interactions, the spin correlations arise purely from quantum interference, and the correlations are both antiferromagnetic and ferromagnetic, in striking contrast to the equilibrium Nagaoka effect. These results are relevant for several condensed matter spin systems, and should be observable using state of the art bosonic or fermionic quantum gas microscopes.

Parton Theory of Magnetic Polarons: Mesonic Resonances and Signatures in Dynamics

Topological excitations keep fascinating physicists since many decades. While individual vortices and solitons emerge and have been observed in many areas of physics, their most intriguing higher dimensional topological relatives, skyrmions (smooth, topologically stable textures) and magnetic monopoles emerging almost necessarily in any grand unified theory and responsible for charge quantization remained mostly elusive. Here we propose that loading a three-component nematic superfluid such as 23Na into a deep optical lattice and thereby creating an insulating core, one can create topologically stable skyrmion textures. The skyrmions extreme stability and its compact geometry enable one to investigate the skyrmions structure, and the interplay of topology and excitations in detail. In particular, the superfluids excitation spectrum as well as the quantum numbers are demonstrated to change dramatically due to the skyrmion, and reflect the presence of a trapped monopole, as imposed by the skyrmions topology.

New Frontiers in Fermionic Quantum Gas Microscopy

We study theoretically the interaction between two species of ultracold atoms confined into two layers of a finite separation, and demonstrate the existence of new types of confinement-induced interlayer bound and quasi-bound molecules: these novel exciton-like interlayer molecules appear for both positive and negative scattering lengths, and exist even for layer separations many times larger than the interspecies scattering length. The lifetime of the quasi-bound molecules grows exponentially with increasing layer separation, and they can therefore be observed in simple shaking experiments, as we demonstrate through detailed many-body calculations. These quasi-bound molecules can also give rise to novel interspecies Feshbach resonances, enabling one to control geometrically the interaction between the two species by changing the layer separation. Rather counter-intuitively, the species can be made strongly interacting, by increasing their spatial separation. The separation induced interlayer resonances provide a powerful tool for the experimental control of interspecies interactions and enables one to realize novel quantum phases of multicomponent quantum gases.